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Earlier I ran a nomination thread for the new movie theme, Hard Scifi. But a lot of movies were listed ahead of discussion about what is hard scifi. It is ok for the list to be smaller rather than larger. Instead of starting a new thread, let's just vote on the list we have. Is it hard scifi?
Also we want to weed out any non-English and television.
This is not what movies you want to see or not see. This is what movies you are confident are hard scifi.
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I asked Gemini, and it said:
The Core Pillars of Hard Sci-Fi are:
Scientific Consistency: The story avoids "magic" solutions. If a spaceship travels to another star, the author explains the propulsion system or the biological toll of cryosleep rather than just saying they "jumped to warp."
The "What If" Experiment: These stories often function like a laboratory. The author takes a real scientific principle—like orbital mechanics or genetic engineering—and asks, "What would happen to society if this one thing were pushed to the limit?"
Accuracy over Convenience: If the science says it takes six months to get to Mars, the characters spend six months getting to Mars. The plot is driven by the limitations of technology rather than ignoring them for the sake of pace.
I would say almost every sci-fi has at least one piece of magical tech that can't really be explained fully. The question is how many pieces of magic tech do you have to accept and how well does everything hang together within its own universe before you disqualify it.
IMO the "hardest" ones on the list are the ones that reduce it down to one technology and write everything around that, rather than relying on lesser-explained additional technology for solutions. So those would be (of what I've seen):
I want to say Contact, but it just gets too magical at the end.
I added a plain scifi topic to the theme poll. Alternately, we could take the existing list and label the theme as scifi instead of hard scifi.
Maybe I also could have put a suggestion limit on the nomination thread. That would encourage folks to think of the few films that fit the theme the tightest. It would also be less intimidating for more people to contribute when they don't see a giant list of movies and ask "well, what can I contribute now?"
So maybe in the future we might have a six movie limit. That would still give us a ton of movies and these polls are a little too long anyway.
There is a "Scifi" option.
I didn't vote for it.
I voted for "Hard-Sci-Fi".
I just added the Scifi option. How can you say you want hard scifi and not scifi while in another comment you are suggesting you aren't sure what hard scifi is? And also suggested most of the non-hard scifi films we are now having to filter.
We still don't have a clear definition of what is "hard sci-fi", though there are several to consider in the discussion under Theme change: Nomination Thread for Hard Sci-fi films.
It looks like folks are voting against what they want to see, rather than voting to define whether it's "hard sci-fi" or not.
It's hard to vote for or against a movie you haven't yet seen.
If it is hard to vote for or against a movie you haven't seen then don't. Just upvote movies you have seen that you are confident are hard scifi. Established definitions exist and can be looked up.
Tron?